Five Best Portrayals of Female Characters in Nebula & Hugo Award Winning Novels

Herewith, I submit for your consideration my choices for the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that have the best representations of female characters.

These books all have a woman (or girl) as their primary central character. All of them face life-threatening challenges unprepared and have to use their wits and other assets to overcome or persevere through them, with minimal or no help from the males in their lives. They are all human; they make mistakes and they learn from them. The main character and the other women (or girls) in them are, for the most part, unique individuals, richly and unstereotypically written. The books are written by both men and women; they are set both on earth and in outer space; and they take place in both the past and the future.

Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)

The main character of this book, Kivrin Engle, has to cope with unbelievable heartache while coming up with practical solutions to her very real and immediate problems. To survive, she must not only be an excellent academician and diligent student, but also an able hands-on medic, cook, vet, and gravedigger. She makes plenty of mistakes, but she recovers and learns from them, and she grows during the book so that she is a very different character at the end than she was in the beginning.

Dreamsnake (Vonda N. McIntyre)
Sexy, semi-nude representation on the front cover of the first edition of this book notwithstanding, the main character of this book, Snake, is a thoughtful and pragmatic protagonist. In spite of the limitations of her post-apocalyptic environment, she has become an accomplished healer and scientist. She uses logic, experience, and determination to survive several crises and to inspire others to follow her leadership. She's also one of the only Hugo/Nebula females to get her own real road trip story.

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

The main character of this book, Nell, is born in a poor section of town to a dissolute mother with extremely bad taste in boyfriends. When Nell is young, it seems that everyone who she loves either dies or abandons her. But she has both brains and pluck, she learns technical concepts quickly, and she can come up with ingeniously creative solutions to problems. With those attributes, and the help of a nanotech girls' primer, she is able to not only survive in a pretty hostile post-cyberpunk world, but to become a hero to millions of other girls.

Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Robinson generally does a good job with his female characters; he gives them good stories, cantankerous, unstereotypical personalities, independence, and a lot of brainpower and talent. This book arguably has about seven or eight central characters, several of which are women, whom it follows independently as their lives intertwine. Nadia Cherneshevsky, in particular, is one of the most bad-ass female characters you could have in a realistic hard science fiction novel. She is a talented nuclear engineer; she doesn't like getting caught up in the internal politicking of the other Martian colonists, she just likes going out and getting things done. Things like building the first permanent habitation on Mars, constructing dams and lakes and research facilities and weapons, and figuring out ways to use natural Martian geothermal forces to rapidly make the atmosphere warm enough for human survival.

The Healer’s War (Elizabeth Anne Scarborough)

This story is written from the point of view of Kitty McCulley, a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam during the 1960s. Her experiences are drawn heavily from Scarborough's own experiences during that war. She is a wonderful main character; she is practical and doesn't take much guff, but she also readily admits it when she goofs up. She has compassion for all her patients, whether they are U.S. Army soldiers or Vietnamese civilians. And she has to use both tact and courage to survive while she’s lost alone in the countryside with only villagers to help her.